Posts Tagged 'World'

This week, Lance and I hopped over the pond to attend WorldHostingDays 2011 at Europa-Park in Rust, Germany. If you haven't heard of WorldHostingDays, you may be a little more familiar with WebhostingDays, its more narrowly focused predecessor. Because many of the sessions and discussions at the event have evolved and grown significantly from the pure-play "web hosting" market, the name change was a good one ... And it didn't even require tweaking the WHD abbreviation.

Given the ambitious scope of WorldHostingDays, we weren't sure what to expect from the sessions, but we were excited to hear fresh perspectives on the European-centric hosting market. We walked away from the sessions with a few new ideas to implement into SoftLayer's business, and it was interesting to hear the (regionally accented) conversations focus on the same problems and questions the US hosting industry is tackling: Public and private clouds, IPv6, scalability, stability and security.

Many European companies that are relatively new to the hosting scene are experiencing some phenomenal growth (similar to what we've seen at SoftLayer), and the opportunity is growing exponentially beyond their growth as new markets turn up with fresh needs for quality infrastructure. In these developing markets, local events in Europe like WHD will be invaluable to educate and relate how this relatively new industry might change the face of the local business environment ... And when those efforts carry into Asia, the sky is the limit on the opportunity.

We have some pretty huge global plans on the horizon, and we're excited to position ourselves for worldwide recognition. When WorldHostingDays 2012 rolls around, you're going to see an even bigger, badder and better SoftLayer.

Social unrest can affect our ability to serve our customers. In Egypt, the government recently cut off nearly all access to the Internet, so customers trying to access our servers from Egyptian IP space have been largely unsuccessful. How unsuccessful?

I gathered all the netblocks assigned to Egypt (currently around 5.8 million unique IPv4 IP addresses), and I queried our customer portal access logs and API for records of those IPs. We saw a massive drop on 1/28/2011. This coincides with reports on most major news networks that Egypt’s Internet access had been crippled. Prior to the January 28, the traffic was fairly typical.

Then this happened:

Between January 28 and February 2, about 0.2% of the traffic we normally see from Egypt reached our network. That means 99.8% of traffic was stifled by the network shutdowns.

As the Wall Street Journal reported yesterday, the Egyptian government restored Internet service, and our logs clearly corroborate that report.